Operations management - Essay Example

which attempted to retain market leadership by focussing solely on improvement of operational effectiveness without paying adequate attention to the overall business strategy of brand positioning and other very important human resource issues as job satisfaction, aggressiveness, motivation, performance, trust and commitment. Both made the same mistake of forgetting the broader perspective and tried to tackle an economic and marketing issue in isolation. It was only natural that both the attempts ended in failure.

There were several different types of issues that had to be resolved as the project developed. At one end was the difficulty in transposing the theoretical knowledge acquired from study modules to the practical context of the project. At the other end was the lack of skill in identifying broad trends that generally tend to affect business mandarins all over the world. There surely is a trend-setter like Toyota, but it requires the experience of a veteran researcher to be able to identify a new trend and forecast a phenomenon that will sweep the world in days to come even when it is in its nascent stage and is being experimented and fine tuned by the trend setter.

This ability to immediately spot an idea that would shape tomorrow’s business and commerce can only be acquired through years of patient research and, quite obviously, is not visible in the current project. At this stage, it must be admitted that the in-depth graphical analysis of the operational wheel of Tesco or a thorough examination of the technology and production processes adopted by Morgan car manufacturing company helped the researcher to attain that analytical frame of mind. The extensive knowledge (albeit theoretical) about not only lean but also agile supply chains that the researcher obtained by undertaking several projects on this topic made him fully realise the necessity of the decoupling point